alt Hacker NewsI wanted a camera that doesn't exist, so I built it
Comments
> So what else qualifies me to do this camera?
I understand the urge to say this to potential blog readers. But you're not actually selling us anything. Who cares if you're qualified or not? You built it and you're telling us what you learned.
The Panasonic GX series of cameras was very similar to what we see here, and prices for them remain elevated years past their discontinuation. I'm a little surprised they haven't introduced a new model in that lineup.
The Fuji X-E5 also seems similar to this, though obviously with a different lens mount.
I have to say I'm a bit unimpressed with the efforts of the MFT consumer system camera manufacturers. Panasonic creates excellent cameras, they're so big it lessens the appeal of the smaller mount. OM makes cameras of the right size, but it's releasing new models really really slowly, with mediocre sensors. The OM-5 mark II is a lame rehash. Only the OM-3 is somewhat exciting, but it sacrifices too much in terms of ergonomics to achieve an aesthetic I don't care about.
On the other hand there's no other class of camera that really works on vacation/travel and is meaningfully better than a smartphone. Oh, well.
This post, where someone from one field decides to do something they love but in another field, reminds me of the below:
At my kids' elementary school there is a yearly "Dad's Night" show where the dads get up and do skits, dance, sing and/or make funny videos.
You get to see dads who sell insurance or are lawyers do dance numbers that look professionally choreographed or make music videos that look like they could have been on MTV.
It's a reminder that "The Sort" pulls people very strongly into certain fields but there is always that question, from the movie Up In The Air and asked by George Clooney, "How much did they pay you to give up your dream?" [0]
Part of me is VERY excited to see AI/LLMs help facilitate this for the people who always thought "I have always wanted to write a piece of software but didn't know how and now I can!"
Very impressive build! It's amazing what one can do thanks to CNC and FLPCB manufacturing services readily available to any motivated hacker.
One tip for the author who noticed the camera being warm: measure its power consumption, and compare to an unmodified G9ii. Especially because you noticed it drains the battery relatively quickly(!) This is a glaring "connect the dots" situation to me. The root cause might be something very stupid. For example when you removed the microphone jack, the camera thought a microphone was connected, so it activated a microphone nenu. But given the extensive number of mods you made, it's possible you are making the firmware think some accessory is connected—could be anything: (light) flash, external screen, USB gadget, JTAG reader, SD card, etc. So it's taking a code path to initialize the device, but it fails because the device is not present, and it retries repeatedly, thus entering a retry loop that's causing excessive CPU usage... That wouldn't suprise me. You are running a G9ii that's unique therefore a rare software code path like this would not happen on a standard G9ii and would never have been fixed by the developers.
This is amazing. It's such a shame that Olympus and Panasonic have largely abandoned the small camera market within the M43 system. I really wish another manufacturer would step up and build something similar to the GX85, which is still one of my favorite walkaround cameras.
This is awesome! Great work. The "do first, ask questions later" mindset is inspiring as it's so easy (for me at least) to get stuck forever in a preparation / ideas phase.
I would also love to see some photos taken with it.
> the lens should be as centered as possible. I wanted to avoid that horrendous look of cameras with the lens as close to the left edge as possible (Sony a6000, I’m looking at you here).
Funny, the things some people obsess about :)
Amazing work, and so inspiring! The size difference compared to the G9ii made it all worth it!
Lately I've been converting a few old 5k iMac's to work as external displays, and I had a thought about making my own housing for the display instead of using the iMac chassis. This gives me some motivation to look into it further!
Oh, that effort.
I’ve been thinking about putting an MFT mount on my RX100 to use it with more interesting lenses (I have it for the high frame rate capability) but concluded it to be way too much effort and risk.
And then along comes a person with enough determination to build an entire custom case! Truly impressive.
Wow! This is the kind of news that we want on hacker news in 2026. Amazing hacker ethos.
The article could have been better with sharing some photos taken with the new camera.
I do not know if the author/creator is a user here on HN. But if you are, then absolutely amazing work. I love everything about it! You really did create a much more aesthetically pleasing camera and must have learned a ton along the way. I applaud your courage and/or naïveté to even undertake a project like this for no other reason than because you want it to exist.
Any chemists or crystallographers out here?
I recently got curious about whether nature solves the Bayer pattern problem and if so, how.
Are there any 3 element crystalline compounds with the formula A_2BC with roughly same sized atoms for A, B and C ?
If they have a 2D tiling that would nature's Bayer pattern.
Pretty neat that you can do this nowadays and it only costs $3,000 instead of $30,000
>>> …them myself with a manual tapping tool. Well, that didn’t go well, it was hard to keep the tool straight, the threads were loose, and broke few taps rendering the holes useless.
Cheap taps from Amazon?
A weird contradiction for the licensing [0]:
> This project is open-source under the MIT License. Feel free to modify and use — but no commercial use without permission.
[0] https://github.com/cristibaluta/Leica-G9ii?tab=readme-ov-fil...
This is an amazing project and level of effort, and I empathize deeply with this photographers desire for a clean, simple, beautiful camera.
I so deeply want a modern EVF camera, doesn’t even have to be a rangefinder, with a mechanically wound shutter so the film advance lever has a reason to exist.
I’m aware of the Epson R1 but 6MP is too low.
reminded me of camera-from-a-scanner project I saw not so long ago
incredible project but unless I'm misunderstanding what he is comparing it to, this is only a few hundred dollars/euros less than a used leica m digital body per a quick ebay search.
This is an incredible project! Thanks for sharing. Love to see some photos taken in this camera!
> I still don’t have the camera I imagined,
lol. Sounds like every passion project, ever.
I have friends who have worked on their car project, their bathroom project, their workshop project, their custom pc build, even the home they built.
I wonder if anyone has ever built something and said... "It is perfect, I am satisfied!"
Maybe just from the outside. Like the casio f91w, the ak47, the porsche 959 or the hersheys bar.
It's a nice build, but there is a baffling discordance between putting all this time and money into making a CNC body and ripping the ports off a $1900 camera's motherboard with pliers when the soldering iron didn't do the job rather than waiting until you could get a hot air rig, which could easily have destroyed the motherboard by peeling a trace or cracking layers. I guess at a certain point you just have too much money to behave rationally.
A triumph. I love this.
> the Lumix lenses are crippled on Olympus bodies
Are they?
This is batshit insane, and I fully fully endorse this person's madness to do such things. This is what the internet is _for_
Going straight into making a camera is very much a bold move.
my next comment isn't for the author, as they have strong enough opinions on cameras to do this. But for everyone else, I have greatly enjoyed fujifilms line of cameras.
I borrowed a gfx100s from work, and my word is a wonderful machine. (it should be for the price) for more normal budgets, the x series is great. Unlike a canon what you see is what you get, and the autofocus works on objects rather than the closest fucking thing it sees.
The camera they want is also the camera I want. I say this as someone who still regularly shoots with an Olympus Pen-F and also has a Fuji X100VI, and primarily shoots a Nikon Z8 but wishes there was a more compact entry into FF. I actually really like the m4/3/MFT format, especially for travel photography, but it's a struggle because the best lenses are Pana/Leica and the best bodies are OM/Oly, and neither has done much to really develop the technology in the last 10 years. MFT feels dead, but even as a dead format, nothing compares to the size/weight flexibility it gives you.
Title is misleading — if you read to the end, he did not end up with a usable camera.
Gives a sense of how infuriating the G9ii update was to G9 users. The guts are ergonomically better off in a rangefinder body than what Panny shipped.
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Off topic: why do people keep posting on medium?
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Wow, that's cool.
If there is anything that can be patented, I'd make sure to patent it.
As someone who's been doing mechanical product engineering for 30+ years, doing this as a first project is way more than jumping off the deep end. Impressive.